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A soggy week!

What a soggy end to a week that involved lots of mud and water! The children thoroughly enjoyed their walk to church this afternoon with their buddies, despite getting soaked! They all walked confidently up the aisle to place their specially painted pebble (a gift from their year 6 buddies) next to the candle to represent the start of their journey at Blue Coat. It was a lovely service and great to welcome so many parents too.

The water and mud made a very messy contribution to forest school this week! We dug, mixed, dribbled and drew with mud, mostly over each other! Thank goodness for our waterproofs! The children are learning to work together, share resources and use their imaginations to explore their outdoor world and are growing in confidence and developing wonderful language as a result.

We did some writing outside this week too, searching for hidden words in our outdoor area and writing them on our clipboards. More of that to follow for anyone who didn't get a turn. Mrs Hunt was most impressed with the beautiful handwriting the children began on Wednesday in their new special books. We are beginning to write lots of letters correctly, remembering their starting places and which way round to write them.

I am so impressed with our brilliant readers; we have discovered lots of words that we can make with our sounds learnt to date and are telling fantastic stories from our reading books. It's hard at first if there are sounds we don't know in our Biff and Chip books but we are getting very good at using the pictures to tell the story and give us clues if we have words to read. I wonder who can spot our tricky words; the, I and to in their books or bedtime stories this week?

Next week we will be introducing the children to the idea of 'talk partners'. The children will all have a talk partner in their class; we will be finding out about each other and learning to listen to each other and ask questions and later we will be solving problems together, sharing ideas and helping each other to learn in all sorts of ways.

Our talk partners will be very useful as we begin to tell the story of The Gingerbread Man. We have already read two versions of the story. I wonder if anyone else has a copy at home which they would like to share? Soon we will be acting out the story, designing new ways to help the Gingerbread man across the river and hunting for hidden gingerbread men outside and using lots of good positional language to describe where we find him!